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Each summer between 1790 and 1860, hundreds and eventually thousands of southern men and women left the diseases and boredom of their plantation homes and journeyed to the healthful and entertaining Virginia Springs. While some came in search of a cure, most traveled over the mountains to enjoy the fashionable society and participate in an array of social activities.At the springs, visitors, as well as their slaves, interacted with one another and engaged in behavior quite different from the picture presented by most historians. In the leisurely and pleasure-filled environment of the springs, plantation society's hierarchies became at once more relaxed and more contested; its rituals and rules sometimes changed and reformed; and its gender divisions often softened and blurred.In Ladies and Gentlemen on Display, Charlene Boyer Lewis argues that the Virginia Springs provided a theater of sorts, where contests for power between men and women, fashionables and evangelicals, blacks and whites, old and young, and even northerners and southerners played out -- away from the traditional roles of the plantation. In their pursuit of health and pleasure, white southerners created a truly regional community at the springs. At this edge of the South, elite southern society shaped itself, defining what it meant to be a "Southerner" and redefining social roles and relations.

List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

3

(10)

The Scene

13

(44)

``Solidity, Strength, and Grandeur''

16

(15)

``A Country More Wildly Picturesque''

31

(5)

``At Great Trouble and Expense''

36

(13)

``Bribe High and You Live High''

49

(8)

Healing Waters

57

(42)

``King Cure All''

59

(9)

``They All Drink the Waters without the Advice of Any Medical Man''

68

(10)

``Every Day Var[ies] a Little''

78

(7)

``The Most Delicious Sensations''

85

(14)

Community and Competition

99

(110)

``A Never Ceasing Scene of Stir, Animation, Display, & Enjoyment''

104

(15)

``Forming Violent Friendships in Three Days Time''

119

(8)

``You Might Have Supposed Them All Quite Intimate''

127

(15)

``You Are Now Just Entering upon That School of Life''

142

(10)

``A Great Deal Is Affected, but Nothing on the Heart in It''

152

(23)

``Love-Making May Fairly Be Set Down as One of the Amusements of the Virginia Springs''